The most disturbing about this debate? That the “Hegel” everyone (including Fukuyama and Kimball) keeps talking about is largely a fiction concocted second- or third-hand from later sources, mainly Marx and Popper.
In his mature works, Hegel never made predictions about the future and renounced making such predictions. He saw the philosopher of history as understanding the present in terms of the past. When his Philosophy of History was published in the 1830s, based on his teaching notes, he had seen where the modern world was headed. Tocqueville saw the same thing less than a decade later. Fifty years later, Nietzsche saw the same thing. What’s so objectionable about Hegel’s view?
When Hegel used the term “Germanisch,” he meant roughly “modern Western.” There was no good term at the time in German to mean what he meant, which was the collection of post-Roman barbarian peoples who made modern Europe (as distinct from classical antiquity). If Hegel had meant *Germans* (the country known then and now as Germany), he would have used “Deutsch.” In fact, he carefully distinguished the two.
Anyone who’s read any Hegel at all knows that he saw the development of “liberal” regimes as the tendency of modernity. (His actual term is “Rechtstaat,” or roughly, “rule-of-law state,” not precisely the same as democracy.) He plainly viewed the semi-liberal regimes of western Europe and north America as the paradigm, *not* Prussia, and he says or implies it repeatedly. (Saying it out loud in Europe after 1815 might have caused more trouble than it was worth — later Hegel was teaching in a period of reaction and quietism.) Hegel was mainly talking about the Western world, and he says so. He has little to say about the non-Western world, as he viewed the course of history as unilinear. He has been fairly criticized for this, even at the time.
Finally, while eschewing historical prophecy (contrary to the ingrained legend), Hegel did have negative forbodings about modern Europe’s ultimate fate. When he talks about an “end of history,” *this* is what he had in mind. He saw the Americas as the new world and, in all probability, the historical successor to Europe. The “young Hegelians” (Marx among them) reacted strongly to Hegel’s tentative pessimism and developed utopian theories of history and political programs to fit. There is where you’ll find the origin of the popular “Hegel myth.”
It’s depressing to see debates like this carried on at such a dumb level, with discredited and tendentious secondary sources as the starting point. What makes it inexcusable is that Hegel’s later works (lecture and teaching notes from his classes) are generally clear and available in decent 19th and 20th century English translations. There’s no excuse for relying on the garbled legend transmitted by Marx, Popper, and others.
